Sunday was a good day got time to do a lot of reading, and there was a breakthrough in conceptualising Emergic. I used to think of what we want to do more on the lines of Microsoft and its MS-Windows and MS-Office. But in doing so, I was missing out on the bigger picture. What we are really want to do to Enterprise Software and the IT architecture is bring out the kind of revolution Intels microprocessor did. Thinking about the enterprise the way the personal computer is makes the model much clearer. Ill be writing more about this over the next few days as part of my ongoing series of Tech Talks.
Meanwhile, the updates on the current Emergic activities:
BlogStreet: Weve been writing various proglets for blogroll extracting. Need to integrate them together this week. We didnt do any blog addition, because of my realisation that the approach of manually adding and classifying blogs is fundamentally flawed. We need to automate that process, and have bloggers themselves add their blogs. Developments like RSS auto-discovery in the past week have also made me think that the process of identifying clusters can be simplified. Well be re-working our BlogSTreet strategy this week.
Digital Dashboard: We wrote out the Outline Web Service but were facing some problems when it came to larger outlines. Working to fix this. Also wrote out an Outline-to-Presentation utility. In parallel, as a precursor to working with blogs, have been putting together an RSS Aggregator.
Thin Client-Thick Server: We now have 13 people using the Thin Client architecture on their desktops. Next step is to migrate the others who are using Windows. My notebook (2-year-old Fujitsu) was also converted into a Thin Client so I no longer need a separate desktop. This is important because it validates what we have done the ability to take almost any computer and make it into a Thin Client. This week, as we migrate my Mails over, I should have little reason to use a Windows machine! Bookmarks and Cookies migration was smooth. The one problem with OpenOffice which I came across was that the apostrophes and quotes get replaced with question marks. Need to get a solution for that.
Enterprise Software: This continues to be the most nebulous area and the one I have been spending the most time thinking through. As a start, we are going to work on integrating information within our organisation from Tally (accounting) and the customer information in MS-Excel. We want to do this using Sash, an open-source database and J2EE.
Messaging: Work continues to build out the channel, and enhance the core product with support for real-time messaging through SMS alerts.
